Why do we call Deutschland Germany?

[goddess40]

and Nippon Japan?

Is it arrogance, stupidity, or just nastiness?

I remember finding out in about 7th grade that these countries had different names and I still don't understand why we don't allow countries to name themselves. Do they do this all over the world?

[bryant69]

1. Yeah

In France, for example, they call us Les Etats Unis.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. That is a literal translation, though. A bit different than Japan/Nippon

isn't it?

[bryant69]

8. Nope

We speak english here. They should speak english there - at least in referring to us!

Anyway how do you know that Nippon isn't Japanese for Japan?

[Gildor Inglorion]

22. Isn't "Japan" just an English mispronunciation of "Nippon"?

Like "Bombay" for "Mumbai" or "Par-iss" for the French capital?
:think:

[Art_from_Ark]

41. No, "Japan" is a corruption of the Chinese "Zhipangu" which meant

"Land of Gold", at least in the days of Marco Polo, who took the word back to Europe after he left China. "Nippon" literally means "source of the sun (or day)".

[Art_from_Ark]

56. According to this Japanese account, the original Chinese was Ji-pen-kuo

"Ji" (yellow) + "pen" (metal) + "kuo" (country or land), and Marco Polo heard it as "Zhipangu" (or "Jipangu"). He took that name back to Europe, where it was adopted in one form or another by the various European languages of his time.

http://www.actv.ne.jp/�`yappi/tanosii-sekaisi/07_china/07-23_marco-polo.html

Japan = ‰©‹à‚Ì�‘

[Telly Savalas]

51. Not really.

Different languages have different words for places.

The French call Germany Allemagne. Is this arrogance, stupidity, or nastiness?

[Art_from_Ark]

54. Allemannia was a region in Charlmagne's empire

and was principally German(ic)-speaking. The Alemanni themselves were one of the German tribes that had been defeated by Clovis just after the fall of the Roman Empire. In Latin countries (France, Spain, Italy), a variation of the name Allemania has long been used to refer to all of Germany, much like Holland is used to refer to all of the Netherlands and England is used to refer to all of the UK (much to the chagrin of the Scots and Welsh)

[goddess40]

4. I'm surprised they don't call us Les Etats Anus

since the bush administration has made such an ass of the USA

[tocqueville]

11. please don't spread that one

I am amazed nobody here thought of that before

[bunkerbuster1]

66. Sure am glad I wasn't drinkin' coffee

when I read that.



I'll have to steal that...

[Swamp Rat]

3. Ist es weil Amerikaner nicht Deutsches sprechen?

:shrug:

[flyingfysh]

5. it could be worse

Russians use a word transliterated as "nemetskii", which means "mutes". This derives from a time hundreds of years ago when German traders were in Russia, but were unable to speak the language.

[displacedtexan]

6. Germania

The Latin name.

[Waya]

9. Nippon....

...comes from Dai Nippon - Great Japan. It has its origin in the Chinese expression of where the sun comes from....or the Land of the Rising Sun.

[DavidDvorkin]

7. Because of the Romans

Who called the area Germania.

[Uncle Roy]

28. Teutonic tribes vs Germanic tribes...

It's an interesting question.

Deutschland == land of the Teutons

Did the Romans have a word like "Teutonia"? Or did they use "Germania" exclusively? And where did THEY come up with the root word "german", if the Germans themselves didn't use the term? (This is like the original question re English, but moved back a couple of thousand years to Latin...). Any Latin scholars out there?

And, while we are at it, why are the Netherlanders "Dutch"? It looks like that same "deutsch" root word again...

[displacedtexan]

33. Ger Mann

"Men with big sticks."

I have a master's in French & German.

[Lexingtonian]

36. it's an amusing question

For a long time the semi-official answer was that the Romans obviously took the selfdescriptive term 'ger men', men of the ger (a heavy spear thrown using a leather noose), from the fellows themselves. And the ger was a pretty characteristic weapon of the set of tribes being described. Plus, there were the Saxons, a Germanic tribe that named itself after its characteristic war weapon, the 'Sachs' (a form of axe). It was a pretty tidy, self-complementary explanation, but it was all correlation and a subjective reading of the evidence.

By the time of Roman expansion north of the Alps the ger was almost obsolete as a weapon...on closer inspection, it's not clear why the German tribes would choose/accept the ger as somehow embodying their distinctiveness or character. The ger was clearly a bulky, difficult, weapon that took very strong and skilled people to use to effect, and it was clearly developed to bring down big Ice Age animals that are cornered or don't flee- i.e. aurochs, bears, big stags (deer or elk) that were nearing extinction even then. It was a one-shot weapon at best in inter-German and German-Roman battles, i.e. inconsequential in the outcomes. Not exactly the way a set of peoples that was then engaged in constant warfare (usually with each other) was likely to identify its brand of macho or prowess or capability.

Lately the linguists are going back to the Roman sources and are starting to think that what happened was that the indigenous/Italic-origin Latin word 'germanus' was used as a translation of what Germanic folks termed each other. 'German' might be what is called a 'calque'- a literal translation of an internal usage into an outsider's language (here Latin).

The Latin term 'germanus' denotes the fuzzy loyalty and feelings people of the Ancient World had toward their kin; it translates into "dear" or "favored" or "relative/related"...it's a denotation of family/kin/clan loyalties. The Germanic lumping term, probably coidentified with the feelings evoked, for family/kin/clan at the time was something like swabes- surviving related terms in High German are stuff like Geschwister (siblings) and Schwager (male in-law). (I'm not actually a linguist.)

The closest solidly Germanically settled area at the time to Rome, and likely in a lot of trading contact with Italy because the Rhein (the big trading route northward) runs around its southern and western edges, is the southwestern region of Germany still called Schwaben internally. The ancient trade routes between the Rhein and Danube plains run straight through it; the people who live there are still players in international trade...these days they make and sell machine tools and Mercedes cars and such.

So the historical linguists are guessing that outside their tribal areas, in Italy, German traders and visitors and delegates and such referred to each other not by tribal identifiers but as swabes, as extended kin. Who knows, maybe the strong farm-clan German family structure of nineteenth century legend and stick-together in conflict situations tribal ideology was what their ancestors back in 500 B.C. or earlier considered important and distinctive. Happily, it wasn't Lederhosen.... :D

[Uncle Roy]

40. The Wikipedia article on "Germanic Tribes"

mentions the "suebi". I suspect they must be your Swabes (Schwaben). I love your tie-in with "Schwester"!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_tribe

It turns out that the people who live in Deutschland these days DO use the term "german", but for them it means something like "all the Germanic peoples", ie most of northern europe.

Wonderful discussion!!

Roy Robertson

[alfredo]

48. Of course the big stick could have other meanings.

[fudge stripe cookays]

64. Interesting post, Lex!

I love stuff like this-- learning the origins of words and naming traditions! I took a History of the English Language class in college.

I loved finding out the origin of our family name Crittenden (which I had always wondered about). What did it mean?

Evidently, it comes from a Druidic ritual. The Druids would find a clearing (a "dene") with a large oak tree with the branches resembling a large cross, and scrape the bark ("Crit" or "crut"; the plural is "critten" or "crutten") off the tree.

Then they would light a ceremonial fire with the bark in the clearing and do human sacrifices, or whatever the Druids did.

FSC

[sshan2525]

10. Um, because we speak English, not Englisch or Anglais?

You can't possibly be serious with this post, can you? You need to get out of the Etas-Unis more.

[tocqueville]

21. How French Has Influenced English

http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish.htm

Bill Bryson calls the Norman conquest of 1066 the "final cataclysm awaited the English language." (1) When William the Conqueror became king of England, French took over as the language of the court, administration, and culture - and stayed there for 300 years. Meanwhile, English was "demoted" to everyday, unprestigious uses. These two languages existed side by side in England with no noticeable difficulties; in fact, since English was essentially ignored by grammarians during this time, it took advantage of its lowly status to become a grammatically simpler language and, after only 70 or 80 years existing side-by-side with French, Old English segued into Middle English.
....................
More than a third of all English words are derived directly or indirectly from French, and it's estimated that English speakers who have never studied French already know 15,000 French words. (2)

[Cornus]

24. ROFLMAO

[goddess40]

25. Actually it is a serious post

What if it was decided that you should be called xenon, and now there was a group of people that refuse to call you by your given name. Some people would go with the flow and look at it as a nickname but others would be hugely offended. Just because a group of people say xenon is a translation of your name doesn't make it so.


(I know you could just write them off, unlike an entire country being renamed it's just for illustrative purposes)

I'm not looking for a fight just some real answers

[sshan2525]

31. Call me whatever & whenever you like O' great Goddess of Xenon

just don't make it collect.

[MADem]

12. And then, on top of the latin root word, there's BAVARIA!

Well, over in the ME they call us Ahm-Rik-KAH...when they are being polite (the rest of the time it is some variation on Great Satan).

[htuttle]

13. There's a lot of different terms for us in Mexico...

:evilgrin:

I not sure why that happens. I've read somewhere that throughout history, the names we commonly use for tribes, countries, etc...often come from other people talking 'about' a certain tribe or country (and often may have been descriptive -- or disparaging -- slang), rather than the words that nation used to refer to itself.

I think that most commonly, a nation's name for itself would translate into simply 'The People', rather than something more descriptive.

In other words, I think a culture using it's own term for a foreign culture is a somewhat common thing to do around the world, historically speaking.

[goddess40]

14. but why translate - we can all say Deutschland

It isn't a translation like no, nine, nyet...

They are made up translations

[htuttle]

23. Well, languages aren't built -- they grow organically

Many of these terms go back hundreds or thousands of years. They are like 'fads' that caught on long ago and never went away.

If you are looking for logic in language -- look at Pascal or Java, not English, French or Japanese.

:shrug:

[Mairead]

47. What does one do about Suisse/Schweiz/Svizzera?

The Swiss have 4 different names for what we call Switzerland (I don't know what the Romansch one is)

:evilgrin:

[T Town Jake]

53. It's all a vast conspiracy...

...get screenshots!

[Obamarama]

15. Wow....you have a lot of Gaul!!!

:shrug: Couldn't resist the pun.

[htuttle]

16. Very Hunny

[Waya]

20. In German....

...the United States are 'Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika'. It's the language. Literal translations in the various languages.

[greatauntoftriplets]

17. Same reason that the French call England....

Angleterre, Great Britain Grand Bretagne, Ireland Irlande, and Scotland Ecosse.

:shrug:

Language differences.

[Kicked in the Taco]

37. Indeed

A lot of Scottish people even have "Ecosse" bumper stickers- many of us think it's quite poetic. Vive le difference!

[greatauntoftriplets]

43. Many Americans bring similar bumper stickers home from Europe....

and put them on their cars. The EU symbol has been very popular lately.

[Kicked in the Taco]

45. Heh, interesting.

OT- did you know that the Iranians in 1981 changed the name of the road in Tehran on which the British Embassy was located from Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street? Maybe Bush will try and bait blair into supporting his next imperialist adventure with promises of a name change?!

[greatauntoftriplets]

49. No, I didn't know that....

Bush probably doesn't even know who Bobby Sands is. In fact, there are people ( :eyes: ) who think my avatar is my photo.

Welcome to DU, by the way.

[skibunny4dean]

18. Maybe it's beause

that's just what we call them. :shrug:

[SheilaT]

19. I think the name derives from

one of the tribes in that area, which has come down to us as "German". There were other tribes, the Alemanni, the Goths, the Visigoths, Franks (where our word France comes from), Vandals, Lombardi, and so on.

The French call Germany "Allemand" after the Alemanni tribe.

It's kind of interesting how some things get translated and others don't, especially names. We call the King of Spain Juan Carlos. We don't translate it to John Charles. The Spanish, on the other hand, do translate the names of the British royal family, so they call Queen Elizabeth, Isabel, and Prince Charles, Carlos.

[Cleita]

50. In Spanish, Germany is called Alemania.n/t

[Spider Jerusalem]

26. "Japan" comes from Chinese.

Here's what the OED says about the etymology:

Japan, n. (dZ@"p&n) Also 6 Giapan, 7 Japon. Japan, F., Sp. Japon, Pg. Japão, It. Giappone, app. ad. Malay Jăpung, Japang, ad. Chinese Jih-pŭn (= Japanese Ni-pon), ‘sun-rise’, ‘orient’, f. jih (Jap. ni) 'sun' + pŭn (Jap. pon, hon) origin. The earliest form in which the Chinese name reached Europe was app. in Marco Polo's Chipangu, in Pigafetta Cipanghu. The existing forms represent Pg. Japão and Du. Japan, ‘acquired from the traders at Malacca in the Malay forms’ (Yule).]


I. In primary sense.

1. a. The insular empire so called, on the east of Asia.

†b. A native of Japan, a Japanese. Obs.

[Mairead]

27. It's the same everywhere, really.

We say 'Germany' rather than 'Deutchland', but they say 'Vereinigten Staaten' which doesn't really sound much like 'United States' even tho that's what it means.

Same with Russian. We say 'Russia' and that's rather close to 'Rossiya', but 'Soedenennye Shtaty' doesn't even come close to resembling 'United States' even though, again, that's what it means.

On the other hand, we say 'China' while they say 'Zhongguo' (Middle Country). And in everyday speech they call the US 'Meiguo' (Pretty Country) rather than anything that translates 'United States'.

[tocqueville]

32. a lot of Latin-Americans resent that Americans call themselves

"Americans" and not "US-ites"...

Since America is a continent, only one nation named its dwellers after the continent. The others are Canadians, Mexicans... etc...

[Mairead]

34. Which is why I take some pains to say 'USAians' rather than 'Americans'

Usually, at least.

[DivinBreuvage]

59. Incorrect: Europe was calling us "Americans" long before the Revolution

And, indeed, a moment of common sense and reflection would reveal to anyone that Europeans had been in the 13 colonies for a couple of hundred years before the Revolution (during which the name "United States" was invented), so we couldn't possibly have been called "Estadounidenses" prior to that time, right? It's not our fault that European stock in Canada, Mexico, etc. had less of a independent identity in those days than we did.

I truly sympathize with Latin Americans, who, of course, always identify themselves as Americanos rather than Mexicanos, Chileanos, Peruvianos, etc., and so confusion is natural. But they really need to take their grievance up with Britain, France, and the rest of that scurrilous bunch.

[greekspeak]

29. Maybe it should be cleaned up. But you'll have a tough road to hoe

Which is it? Myanmar or Burma? Cambodia or Kampuchea? Zaire or Congo? All those places with Guinea or a variation thereof, on various continents. Terms like Middle East or even Near East are the leftovers of colonialism. I would love to clean up the vocab, but what are you proposing we do, especially in a publically insular nation which in many ways is one of the most conservative on earth?

[goddess40]

35. Maybe our kids wouldn't suck so bad at geography

if we didn't have two or three names for each place. It would help too if this administration didn't drain the resources from education too - the time (for worthless tests and record keeping) and money.

[tocqueville]

30. an attempt to explain why country names differ

I think that the main reason is historical, why a certain name is chosen

it's not specific to the English language

I think that different factors are playing in the way the current name is chosen

In older times only a few had access to knowledge of other countries, specially if they were far away. So they named countries after hearsayings, books etc...

the name of the country could be difficult to pronounce in the own native language so it was transformed in something else or something that sounded alike

national ego made that the foreign name was translated into the own language

simplified versions were given by the colonial rulers (Africa, Asia) depending of the ethnicity that was most dealt with

demeanishing versions were used for political purposes after a conquest or for domination

[manic expression]

39. On Africa...

that was from Roman times, although I don't know why that was used by the Romans. Remember, Greece and Rome had great contact with "Africa" through Egypt and Carthage, so it probably wasn't born out of ignorance.

Actually, since we have a Latin-based language, we call a lot of things what the Romans called them.

[Trajan]

38. Why do Germans call their nation ...

Deutchland when Romans named the region Germania ?

Cologne (Colony) and Frankfurt (Fortress against the Franks) are both Roman in origin ....

How about freedom ? ... What if we allowed people to freely identify whatever land names they wish ? ....

[Michael_UK]

42. The same reason they say Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika (nt)

[Karenina]

46. One may see that in print

however it is NOT used in common parlance.

[Igel]

44. Poster (19) got it. Ethnonyms are great fun.

There was a Germanic tribe (please note "Germanic" also includes more than Germany) whose names the Romans took as Germani. Germany is where the Germany live.

Just as allemagne, the French word for Germany, is where the Alemannic tribes lived; they moved, and actually wound up in Bavaria, where they ditched their tribe name later. But that's ok: "French" derives from a Germanic tribe that conquered the area around Paris, the Franks, sometime after the original Britons all were kicked out of their lands and moved to France, setting up shop in "Brittany." And we don't have to guess where the Belgae lived. Celtic-speaking, I believe, but don't hold me to that. It was all Gaul, which, of course, wasn't just France, but also Romania (cf. Galicia), and even, after a bunch of Celtic tribes moved in, part of what's now Turkey.

Then again, the mini-kingdoms that were trounced in the Conquista of Spain wasn't Spanish, but Gothic. Go figure.

Bavaria is ultimately named not for any German-speaking tribe, but for the Boii, a *Celtic* speaking tribe.

And, if I'm not mistaken, the ethnonym for the poor Finns comes not from their language, but from where they live: Fen-land.

The Russians (and other Slavs) call a German a "nemets", "nemoi" meaning 'mute'. Just as the Greeks said non-Greeks-speakers went around saying bar-bar (i.e., gibberish), and were, therefore, barbarians. The Germans had a term, probably derogatory, for people that didn't speak intelligibly, mostly speakers of Romance languages. "Walisch" or something like that--my German's bad (although that would be the modern German spelling). This comes out all over Europe: Wallachia is an area in Romania; the Poles call an Italian a "wolch"; and we call the remaining Celtic speakers in the island of England "welsh". This is very common, and the names of obscure languages have undergone heavy revision in recent decades as they revert to what speakers of the languages, not their enemies or competitors called them. Of course, most tribes call themselves either by where they lived, or they use the name "people": whether it's la raza or Theodisch, it just means 'people'. A "Teuton" was just a "member of my people" if you spoke a particular set of Germanic dialects. Of course, Theodisch winds up as "deutsch" today. There's still great dissent over whether 'Slav' derives from the Slavic word for 'word', _slovo_, or the related word _slava_ 'glory'.

There's also a bit of fun to be had with English place names:
-chester comes from Latin 'castrum' ("camp", Russian still has 'kostyor' for campfire), -sex from "Saxon" (Wessex: West Saxon). -by was the Danish word for 'village' (hence by-law), and 'wic' was the Anglo-Saxon word for village: now -wick or -wich. You can map old place names in England for a fun history of who conquered where.

It's a quirk of language history that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes only bequeathed the name of the Angles to what we speak: English, making us 'Anglophones', or English-speaking (after the French 'francophone'). Had the Saxons won, we'd be Sexy or Sexish, and we'd all be Saxophones.

[Kellanved]

52. Why shouldn't you?

Sorry, I don't understand the problem. And yeah, each language does have it's own names for places - so what? :shrug:

It is most certainly not perceived as arrogance.

[Oerdin]

55. None of the above.

It is just the traditional English way of saying that country's name andit is decended from it's Latin name which is Germania.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

57. Isn't it really "Nihon" with a nasal ending "n"?

That's what I think the people of Japan call their country, not Nippon.

[Hekate]

61. Yes it is -- at least so my sensei said...

...back in the day when I was floundering around in the language as the only person in the class who was of Japanese ancestry.

Hekate

[Mairead]

63. 'Nihon' only since WW2, and I understand there's a movement to

return to 'Nippon' as being more reflective of Japan's current world status.

[Liberal In Texas]

58. Convention. It's why we still call the people that are aboriginal to the

Americas, Indians. It has nothing to do with India. Columbus was completely lost when he "discovered" America and thought he was in India, his stated destination for getting the gelt from the Queen of Spain to finance the voyage.

But the name stuck. Like so many other names we call people. It's just convention and the American idiom. NBD.



edited to get the right country Isabella was queen of.

[Hekate]

60. Julius Caesar used the names of tribes: Germanii among them

"All of Gaul is divided into three parts" etc. European tribes had names for themselves, which Caesar recorded in Latin when he wrote about his wars there. They are still with us in various forms: Celti, Gaulli, Helvetii, Germanii...

When I was a kid I had a coin collection (I sent coupons to an address in a comic book and got a small bag of assorted coins) and used to spend hours reading the names of the countries and trying to figure out what they were in English. There's a country that calls itself Helvetica -- guess which? Of course they are the descendents of the Helvetii in what we call ----.

As for Nihon/Nippon/Japan and others: explorers and traders stop in a place, become familiar with it, and learn enough of the language to ask "What do you call those people over yonder?" and they write it down.

Sometimes the answer is akin to "Flat-nosed stupids" and sometimes it is the best rendition the locals can manage of the real name the others call themselves. (A lot of people call their own tribe some variant of "the people" or "the human beings." Who are you? We are The Human Beings.) One ancient slur the Chinese used for the Japanese was "Island Dwarfs," but I don't know that it ever got immortalized on a map. The Japanese didn't help matters much by closing their country to the rest of the world for a couple of centuries, as it let others speak for them.

The names recorded by early white explorers for Native American tribes were often given by rival tribes in answer to the "who are those folks over yonder?" query. In the 20th century certain tribes insisted that the earlier >ahem< mistaken names be replaced by their real names, and ultimately they were.

Human linguistic history -- so much fun.

Hekate

Edit and PS: and I should have read the whole of this thread first! it's even more fun when so many learned DUers chime in!

[WildEyedLiberal]

62. Probably because those are the English words for those countries

And we are an English speaking country, deriving our language from the British who derived theirs from French, Latin, and Greek. I guess you're going to have to insult the xenophobia of the British, medieval French, and Romans if you want to take issue with English etymology. Or is this just another "America is arrogant, stupid, and nasty" thread?

[moggie]

65. Abolish the names

We already have a perfectly serviceable numbering scheme in ISO 3166. So, for example, I live in 826, while you probably live in 840 (no, sorry, you can't be number 1). Obviously we'd have to change all the national anthems, currency, institution names etc etc, but that's a small price to pay for eliminating ambiguity.